Identity work in community volunteering: Understanding women volunteers' experiences in a Chinese context

This study investigates how women volunteers in urban China perform identity work within the gendered structures of community volunteering. While community volunteerism is widely perceived as feminized, informal, and devalued labor, women actively construct, negotiate, and sometimes challenge the meanings of volunteer roles. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in two women-led community volunteer groups in Beijing, this research shows that women navigate gendered expectations by building civic networks, formalizing their practices, and leveraging political identities. These identity strategies help volunteers gain legitimacy and resist the marginalization of their labor. Building on these findings, the study introduces the concept of permitted power to describe the bounded and state-sanctioned forms of authority that women volunteers acquire within patriarchal and bureaucratic systems. While such power remains constrained by institutional hierarchies, it enables women to act strategically within those boundaries-transforming feminized volunteer work into socially valued and politically recognized civic labor.